To feel the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
No one has been more astonished at the news of Keith Athelstone's
engagement than Lady Etwynde. It comes to her in a letter from
Lauraine--a cold and strangely written letter, yet one which has
caused the writer terrible pangs.
When they left Baden they had gone to Falcon's Chase, and entertained
a large house party there. After Christmas Lauraine was coming to
London. She was not strong, and the cold, bleak air of the north
tried her severely. All this Lady Etwynde learnt by letters--letters
that seemed curt and constrained--that in no way revealed anything of
that inner life, those secret springs of feelings which she had
learned to read and gauge in the confidences of that past summer.
She is sitting alone in her room that is like a cameo in the soft
November dusk of the closing day. It is some three days since her
reception and the meeting with Colonel Carlisle. She is thinking she
will write and tell Lauraine about it, and then again she thinks she
had better not. In this state of indecision she is disturbed by the
entrance of one of the æsthetically-clad damsels of her household.
"Do you receive, my lady?" she asks, presenting her with a card.
Lady Etwynde glances at it, then blushes hotly.
"Yes," she says, turning away so that her tell-tale face may not be
noticed. She feels half ashamed, half glad. The name on the card is
"Colonel Carlisle."
She is dressed to-day in olive-green velvet, with touches of old
yellow lace about the throat and wrists; the golden hair is coiled
loosely about her beautifully shaped head, and waves in softly
tangled curls and ripples above her brow. She looks very lovely, and
her visitor's eyes tell her so as he bows over her slender white
hand, and murmurs conventional greeting.
"I am glad to find you at home," he says.
"It is not my day," she answers, smiling up at the tall figure. "But
perhaps you won't object to that. You would have found a crowd here
had it been."
"An æsthetic crowd, of course?"
"Chiefly; but I have other society as well."
"And do you live here quite alone?" he asks curiously.
"Do you mean without a sheep-dog? Oh, yes. Although I don't go in
for advanced thought, I fail to see why an unmarried woman can't live
by herself instead of being bored with a companion."
"And don't you find it lonely?"
"I never have time," she answers tranquilly. "My days are always
fully occupied."
"And you are quite happy and--content?"
"As much as any one can be, I suppose," she says, a faint colour
coming into the proud, delicate face. "I think if one has occupation
and interest one can never be quite unhappy."
"And--affection?" he questions softly.
"Oh, that, of course, one does not expect," she says hurriedly. "I
think a placid life is, after all, the best. It is like monotones in
colour--safe, restful, even it somewhat dull."
"It sounds rather cheerless," says Colonel Carlisle gravely. "Art
cannot satisfy our emotional faculties, or fill our hearts as human
love and sympathy can."
"Tennyson says, 'The feelings are dangerous guides,'" she answers
bitterly; "and emotion is apt to make us capricious. As to sympathy,
well, I don't think I have outlived that----"
"But love, you have?" he interrupts softly.
Her eyes meet his in startled confusion. All their ordinary calm is
swept away.
"Have you any right to ask such a question?" she says coldly.
His face changes. A storm of feeling sweeps over his soul, and for a
moment chains back the impetuous words he fain would utter.
"No; I have not--unless a long, faithful memory of--you gives me any
right."
His voice is very low, his face pale, despite the bronzing of Indian
suns. His eyes rest on her with a great sadness and a great longing
in their depths. She is so much to him--this woman sitting there,
with the dying daylight on her rich-hued dress, and the fire-gleams
playing over the drooped golden head. So much, and he---- Oh, fool
that he has been to lose her!
"I thought men's memories were never faithful," she murmurs, in
answer to his last words.
"I know you judge them very harshly," he answers coldly. "I only
trust that the effeminate, long-haired apostles of your new school
may prove more virtuous, if less manly, than the old type."
She half smiles.
"Physical strength is always impatient of anything weak or imperfect.
A man like yourself dwarfs most of our modern youth into
insignificance. But there are noble souls sometimes in the feeblest
bodies, just as----"
"Thank you," he says, as she hesitates; "I can quite follow your
meaning, and accept it."
She flushes hotly. "Pray do not misunderstand me," she says
hurriedly. "Do not suppose----"
"Oh, no," he answers, gazing back into her uplifted eyes with the
ardour of past years kindling in his own. "I don't think I ever did
_that_. It was you who misunderstood _me_."
"I thought--I hoped you might have forgotten," she says, in confusion.
"It is strange that I have not," he answers. "Thirteen years of such
a life as mine ought to have knocked sentiment pretty well out of
one. But somehow it is not easy to forget what pains one most. Joys
may be soon crowded out of mind and memory; sorrows cling to us
despite ourselves."
She is silent. His words fill her with a strange trouble. The past
comes back again, and she sees her girlhood's hero--a hero no longer,
but a man, erring, sinful, faulty, as all men and women are and will
be in this troubled world. And yet now she feels she understands him
better than she did in those days when she had idealized him into
something grander, nobler, greater than it lay in any man's power to
be.
"When I left you," he resumes presently, gaining courage to speak on
in the silence of the gathering dusk, "I left all the best part of my
life. You were very hard on me, but I will not say that I did not
deserve it. Still, your conduct did not drive me desperate, did not
make me reckless, but rather filled me with shame and sorrow to think
of how far I had fallen short of your worth, your love----"
"Oh hush," she interrupts. "Do you think I am so poor and
contemptible that I can listen to your words and not feel the sting
of my own vanity, my childish ignorance, and stubborn pride? Why, I
have never thought of my words that day without bitter shame; and
you--you were too generous even to reproach me."
"I had no right to do that," he says, very gently. "I acted for the
best, as I thought; I wished to spare you. You misunderstood me;
that was all."
"And all these years you have--remembered me?" she says, faintly,
shyly, not daring to lift her eyes to the grave, noble face.
"Yes," he says simply. "There is nothing so wonderful in that. You
were the real love of my life, though you would not believe it."
Her heart throbs quickly; the colour comes and goes in her face. She
is silent for very joy, for very shame. She feels so unworthy of
this great, true, steadfast love, that she so scorned once, that she
had flung back at his feet in the bygone years because another had
shared, or seemed to share it, before herself.
"You are not offended, I hope?" he says presently. He cannot see the
tears that shine on her lashes; he only knows she is very quiet and
calm, and fears that his words were too bold.
"No. Why should I be?" she says tremulously.
"You did not believe in me then," he goes on. "Not that I blame you,
or indeed have ever blamed you. When a man loves a woman as I loved
you, he loves her with not only admiration for her beauty, but
reverence for the richer possibilities of the nature into which he
has gained an insight. I knew you were proud, and pure, and true,
and I knew that in all my life I should think of no other woman as I
had thought of you. I was right, you see."
Again she was silent. Her heart beats so fast, its quick throbs
almost frighten her, what does he mean! Can it be----
His voice breaks across the tumult of her thoughts.
"You said once you would never forgive me," he says softly. "I
should not like you to know how those words troubled me: how again
and again they would ring in my ears in some scene of danger, at some
moment when Death and I have nearly shaken hands. At such times it
seemed to me impossible that I would ever again be in your presence,
or voluntarily seek it. Yet, strange to say, I have done both. Fate
led me to you when I knew nothing of where I was going, and I find
myself wondering if Time has softened your memory of the wrong I did
you once, if ever you could find it in your heart to say the words I
prayed for then, 'I forgive.'"
The tears spring to her eyes. The old remembered music of his voice
seems to thrill her with joy and pain.
"Do you think me so hard, so cold?" she falters. "Long, long ago, I
have forgiven!"
"And you knew I was--free?"
The warm colour sweeps over her face. Her eyes are hidden from his
eager gaze.
"Yes," she says softly.
"And the past, is it all over?" he says, very low, as he leaves his
chair and bends towards her. "Do you still think I willingly
deceived you?"
"It would have been kinder, wiser, had you told me the truth at
first," she says somewhat faintly.
In the darkness of that shadowy room, with the sense of his presence,
with the rich music of his voice thrilling her heart with the
long-vanished gladness of other days, she feels strangely,
unutterably happy. It makes her almost afraid.
"One thing more," he says, and he kneels at her feet and draws her
hands within his own. "Have art and the world and the silence of
long years driven me out of your heart, for neither danger nor
absence have driven you out of mine?"
"I told you I had not forgotten," she says, trembling greatly and
growing very pale beneath this strange tumult of feeling that is so
full of gladness and yet of fear.
"Forgotten--but that is not all. Do you remember the hard things you
said to me when we parted? I kept back the error of my life, not
because I wished to deceive you, but because I feared the truth would
hurt you, and I dreaded to wound your purity and belief. Heaven
knows I had suffered then, and have suffered since, enough to atone
for a far greater mistake! Were I to come to you now with love as
great and memory as faithful, would you, knowing what is in the past,
be gentler with my folly? Could you--love--me still?"
For all answer she draws her hands from his clasp, and lays them
softly round his neck, and her head sinks on his breast. That touch,
that caress, are a new and purer baptism of the love that has borne
and suffered so much in the years that are dead--dead as their own
pain, and laid at rest for ever now, in a grave that many tears have
watered.